Foucault in Iran: Islamic revolution after the enlightenment: Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi University of Minnesota Press, 2016, x+257., ISBN: 978-0-8166-9949-0

Citation

Saade B (2018) Foucault in Iran: Islamic revolution after the enlightenment: Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi University of Minnesota Press, 2016, x+257., ISBN: 978-0-8166-9949-0. Contemporary Political Theory, 17 (S3), pp. 135-138. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-017-0125-z

Abstract
First paragraph: In Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi displays an impressively meticulous reading of Michel Foucault’s writings on the events that preceded the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy in early 1979. Ghamari-Tabrizi’s main objective involves rescuing Foucault’s ideas and responding to contemporary critiques, most specifically the one raised by Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson in their Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism published in 2005. The texts Foucault published in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera between 1978 and 1979 were relatively few, but the impact they had on the French and the larger Western intellectual sphere was significant, especially because it covered an ideologically charged subject in which the Iranian revolution came to represent a real test to the burgeoning genealogical project at the heart of French theory. In the heyday of postmodern theory and its dislocation of universalist discourses, the events unfolding in 1978–1979 provided food for thought for Foucault, partly because it was an opportunity for Western scholarship to test the extent to which their ideas applied to an unfolding social reality.

Keywords
Political Science and International Relations; Sociology and Political Science

Journal
Contemporary Political Theory: Volume 17, Issue S3